Tuesday, 31 January 2017

A very interesting international conference on “Monuments and Pastoral Regimes - Archaeology of Inner Asia from the Eneolithic to the Early Iron Age” will be held in Bonn, March 2-4 2017Monuments and Pastoral Regimes -
Archaeology of Inner Asia from the Eneolithic
to the Early Iron AgeLVR-LandesMuseum, Colmantstr. 14-16, 53115 BonnMarch, 2-4, 2017

Poring over National Geographic magazines and dreaming of adventure while growing up in small-town Ohio, Medill Prof. Brent Huffman never imagined he would be making repeated trips into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan to chronicle Afghan archaeologists’ race against time — but beginning in the summer of 2011, he did just that.

The documentary filmmaker spent three years traveling in and out of the country to cover the excavation of Mes Aynak, an ancient Buddhist city near the Pakistan border that has been purchased by a Chinese mining company for its wealth of copper.

Huffman filmed the documentary, which followed the archaeologists working to save some of Mes Aynak’s artifacts before mining begins, over the course of a three years, all done in five or six trips of two to three weeks to the archaeological site.

“Looking back, it was a very ‘Indiana Jones’ sort of experience,” Huffman said. “It was really dangerous to go out there, but I felt the risk was worth it.”

The risk did pay off for Huffman. His film, “Saving Mes Aynak, won a $50,000 grant from The Reva and David Logan Foundation earlier this month, and was picked up by international distributor Icarus Films.

Getting it to this point, though, was a challenge, Huffman said. Setting out with a grant from the Buffett Institute and without a crew — he said he didn’t want to put other people at risk — Huffman joined up with a local “fixer,” someone who spoke the language and understood the customs, and began filming in June 2011.

Working without a crew, however, had challenges beyond simply the logistical.

“When you’re a crew of one, you feel that obligation and that pressure to get the story out there,” Huffman said. “If I was killed, the story would die too. There’s no one who’s going to pick up that story and finish it.”

Telling stories, particularly about people or issues he says are often ignored or misrepresented in the media, has always been one of Huffman’s passions. One of his first forays into filmmaking was a documentary he made in college about a maximum security prison in Ohio that focused on the individuals spending their lives behind bars and the corrections officers supervising them.

Growing up in the “one-stoplight, really tiny middle-of-nowhere, surrounded-by-Amish-country” town of Spencer, Ohio, Huffman said he was always more of an outsider, which drew him to stories about other outsiders, particularly marginalized and oppressed cultures in the U.S. and abroad.

He said he was interested in film while he was growing up, and his National Geographic subscription fueled fantasies of traveling and having adventures beyond his hometown.

After high school, he pursued his interests with majors in documentary filmmaking and anthropology at Antioch University in Ohio, which he capped off with a master’s degree in journalism with a documentary focus at the University of California-Berkeley.

“I loved art and was really interested in anthropology — and still am — and documentary filmmaking really combined all of that for me,” he said. “It allowed me to become a part of people’s lives in a way that I couldn’t otherwise and to tell people’s stories.”

He’s also worked to instill the same passion for storytelling in students, those in his documentary filmmaking classes and outside them.

Hannie Lee (Communication ’15) began working with Huffman in January of her senior year, and is currently an outreach assistant working on “Saving Mes Aynak” at Kartemquin Films, a documentary production company that’s been working with Huffman on the film. Lee said working with Huffman has helped her learn to focus on the little aspects of storytelling that make a large impact and to stick with stories.

“He is always like, ‘go out and shoot something,’ rather than think ‘oh, I can’t do it because there’s no story there,’” Lee said. She added that he’s also quite literally enabled her to “go out and shoot something,” lending her his equipment to use for a documentary project as part of her internship.

Huffman’s interest in storytelling, as well as traveling, would eventually lead him to China, where he and his wife, who is Chinese, worked for a National Geographic offshoot after graduate school. Although he came back to the U.S. after several years, teaching at the Brooks Institute in California and later at NU, China remained at the back of his mind, so when he read a The New York Times article about a Chinese mining company setting up in Taliban country, he decided to pursue it further.

The next six years, which also included the birth of his two children, would see this one idea from a The New York Times article grow into an hour-long film with nearly 100,000 Facebook fans and screenings across the globe.

“At great personal cost and risk he went and filmed in an area of the world that not many people go to to film in,” said Tim Horsburgh, director of communications and distribution at Kartemquin Films. “(The film’s online following) is really a testament to Brent recognizing that this is an issue people would be passionate about and sticking with it.”

Huffman himself is very passionate about Mes Aynak. While the film is finished, he said his work is not. Although the film “doesn’t end with bullet points saying this is what should happen,” his ultimate goal in making the film is to permanently prevent mining at Mes Aynak so it can be preserved and explored.

“Making a film, telling this complete story that has an emotional impact — when you cry at a film, it ceases to be just this point of entertainment,” Huffman said. “Emotion can drive energy and be a catalyst for change.”

(Berliner Turfantexte)(German)Paperback– 10 Jun 2016

The Buddhist collection of stories entitled Dasakarmapathavadanamala (garland of legends pertaining to the ten courses of action) is the most important narrative work of Buddhist Central Asia as it is not only attested in Old Uyghur (the best preserved version) but also in Tocharian A and B as well as in Sogdian. Volumes one and two present the reconstructed text in Old Uyghur in transcription (more than 12.500 lines) and facing German translation accompanied by a philological commentary and 250 illustrations of joint fragments. The third volume contains a glossary and the transliterations. The text is a treasure trove of Buddhist j?takas (stories of former lives of the Buddha) and avad?nas (heroic deeds) sometimes told in variants unknown from other Buddhist works. In addition, it contains instructions referring to Buddhist ethics. Next to the Maitrisimit, the Dasakarmapathavadanamala is the second fundamental text translated from Tocharian A and is thus of major importance for Tocharian studies.

The eight studies in this volume by established and emerging scholars range geographically and chronologically from the Greek Kingdom of Bactria of the 2nd century BCE to the Uighur Kingdoms of Karabalgasun in Mongolia and Qoco in Xinjiang of the 8th-9th centuries CE. It contains a key study on sericulture as well on the conduct of the trade in silk between China and the Roman Near East using archaeological as well as literary evidence. Other topics covered include Sogdian religious art, the role of Manichaeism as a Silk Road religion par excellence, the enigmatic names for the Roman Empire in Chinese sources and a multi-lingual gazetteer of place- and ethnic names in Pre-Islamic Central Asia which will be an essential reference tool for researchers. The volume also contains an author and title index to all the Silk Road Studies volumes published up to 2014. The broad ranging theme covered by this volume should appeal to a wider public fascinated by the history of the Silk Road and wishing to be informed of the latest state of research. Because of the centrality of the topics covered by this study, the volume could serve as a basic reading text for university courses on the history of the Silk Road.

7. SAMUEL N. C. LIEU & GUNNER MIKKELSEN Places and Peoples in Central Asia and in the Graeco-Roman Near East – A Multilingual Gazetteer from Select Pre-Islamic Sources 8. LYNDON A. ARDEN-WONG Some Thoughts on Manichaean Architecture and its Application in the Eastern Uighur Khaganate

The ongoing exhibition, titled 'The Ruins of Kočo: Traces of Wooden Architecture from the Ancient Silk Route', at the Museum of Asian Art, Berlin, will end on January 8, 2017. This is your last opportunity to check out the objects from the Tufran expeditions at the museum.

The temple city of Kočo (Chinese: Gaochang) is located near Turfan, in the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, China. More than 100 years after the return of the Berlin researchers from Central Asia, new discoveries are still being made from that time on. Painted wooden beams inscribed with Buddhist texts that were brought back by Albert Grünwedel are now being considered as pieces of a ceiling and a door. This discovery prompted a team from the museum to visit the temple city of Kočo, where they searched for wood architecture and analyzed reports and photographs from three Turfan expeditions, which gave birth to new understandings of the monastery buildings that are on display at the exhibition. The exhibition will also showcase unique objects found in the three buildings analyzed in Kočo, which will act as a preview of Humboldt Forum. Painting, texts and sculptures in Buddhist and Manichaean monasteries, as well as architectural elements of everyday life, shed new light on that era.

The exhibition is on view at the Museum of Asian Art, Lansstraße 8, 14195 Berlin, Germany.

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Hans van Roon

About Me

My fascination for these subjects started in the '80 's by reading the book of Peter Hopkirk about the travels and explorations of Aurel Stein in Central Asia at the beginning of the 20th century.
Over the Silk Road through Central Asia, the Taklamakan Desert, Bokhara and Samarkand I arrived in the 13th century and followed the building of a world empire by Genghis Khan, his sons and grandsons.
His most famous grand son was Khubilai Khan and with him I ended in the Yuan Dynasty in the time when Marco Polo visited China and since than I never stopped reading again

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0

Bibliotheca Sinica 2.0 explores Sino-Western encounters with a guide to digitized books on China published between 1477 and 1939

Yale Silk Road Database

The Yale Silk Road Database serves as a multi-disciplinary resource with relevance to students and faculty working in the fields of art and archaeology, religious studies, history, East Asian languages and literatures, Central Asian and Islamic studies.

International Dunhuang Project

IDP is a ground-breaking international collaboration to make information and images of all manuscripts, paintings, textiles and artefacts from Dunhuang and archaeological sites of the Eastern Silk Road freely available on the Internet